Computers: A History

Even the most humdrum of electrical devices nowadays contains at least one computer; yet surprisingly few people are aware of their history, their form or function.

In this talk we will see that not only is the history of computers rich and diverse, their architecture likewise. Astonishingly, all the computers ever made can be modelled by one universal machine – the Turing machine.

A lecture by Richard Harvey

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

[JoannaHammond]

I remember when I was at school, I was a very quiet shy person who basically hid away. We had to do a lecture on any subject we wanted, to last around 15mins. I chose to do a history of computers and they couldn't shut me up. In the end with all the questions and interest from everyone it lasted about an hour, the length of the class. This was back in the late 80's .

[TheMusicWiz]

It just dawned on me how much I have lived on the forefront of the digital revolution...all the way from a Commodore 64 and visicalc and early Steingberg pro 16 music software, to where we are now.
Interesting lecture ...it sure reminded me of many things I had long forgotten :)

[Graham_Rule]

The fax patent shown in the talk reminded me that the earliest fax machine was patented in 1843 - before the telephone had been invented. If it had been of high enough quality I wonder if people would have prefered to write, then fax, letters to each other rather than speaking on the phone. A bit like text messaging instead of video calling.

[stevebriggs]

Very cool. Thanks. BTW there is a typo, it's Gnutella not guntella :)

[marcvanleeuwen]

I was a bit surprised by the claim that Forethought (Powerpoint) was the _first_ acquisition, by Microsoft, in 1987. It is well known that already in 1981 Microsoft bought the operating system 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, which they then rebranded as MS-DOS. It took some careful replaying of what you said to understand that Forethought was the first _company_ that was fully swallowed by Microsoft, as opposed to the acquisition of just software.

[JoannaHammond]

I formatted my enitre final year thesis in LaTeX, a lot easier to use than Word back then, such fun times... :D

[parrotraiser]

Watson could be excused his limited market view. The number of people who could afford the enormous price of a computer at the time, and had the problems that would justify it was quite limited. (Governments and similar-sized entities.)
The Weizac generated Nobel Prizes when it was the first and only computer in Israel.
Claude Shannon's wife Betty, a mathematician, was important to his work.
The LEO trip to see ENIAC was a cover story. One of Lyon's people had learnt the value of data processing working at Bletchley Park during WWII, but couldn't reveal it.
DEC's decline could be explained by the work of its Sales Prevention Department, as it was generally known.

[Graham_Rule]

I wonder how much early wordprocessing was based on things like the flexowriter. You could type a document which appeared on the paper but also on paper tape. Editing functions could change the tape so that you could print a clean, modified, version of the paper document. You could even do mailmerge where zones in the master document (running the tape in a loop) were replaced by data from another tape (the address list). I used one in my first job in 1974 to send covering letters with printed reports. The reports included results from programs run from punched cards but that's another story.

[NuGanjaTron]

17:10 Grace Hopper looks like the type who stayed up all night playing Tour of Duty while snorting poppers and blasting Daft Punk...

[DavidChipman]

Where are the previous lectures mentioned in this video?

[jrbeeler]

Konrad Zuse built a computer that followed a list of binary instructions -- in 1941. The program and data storage were separate, and it didn't have conditional branching, but it did have loops.

[jtveg]

38:58 Perhaps because Apple's early computers had such noisy fans that they now have such an aversion to them and have been desperately innovating all sorts of cooling solutions in order to get rid of any fans from their products. That noise must've been so triggering to Steve Jobs.

[willhovell]

How can you possibly claim to be a history without mentioning Colossus, Tommy Flowers, the Dollis Hill GPO research station, the National Computing Centre and of course Turing?

[tigeovhe]

Looks like he’s making his presentation from a shower stall or public bathroom. Lol!

[marksmadhousemetaphysicalm]

Not to mention loading a slide tray...the old ones, you might put a slide or two in backwards...😁

[sailor]

$18, 000 monthly rental on 1953 was indeed a princely sum not to be scoffed at. Over $175, 000 in today’s currency, over $2, 000, 000 per year. Not bad rental income for a lowly 701 IBM computer.

[darylallen]

1:00:10 - please add the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.